In the last week, a new confrontation has emerged over al-Aqsa Mosque compound, in the context of intensifying efforts by Israeli authorities and settlers to change the status quo and take over Palestinian properties in and around the Old City.

The Jordanian government recently decided to expand the composition of the Waqf – the body charged with managing al-Aqsa Mosque compound – to include a number of high-ranking Palestinians, alongside the long-standing Jordanian members.

Gates shuttered

The move came in response to what International Crisis Group’s Ofer Zalzberg described to Haaretz as “the erosion of the status quo” at the site, including the tolerance by Israeli occupation forces of “quiet worship” by Jews in the compound – “a relatively new development”, the paper noted.

Last Thursday, the newly expanded council inspected, and prayed at, a building located at the Gate of Mercy (Bab al-Rahma), shuttered by Israeli occupation authorities since 2003. At the time, the closure was justified on the grounds of alleged political activities and links to Hamas – but the building has remained closed ever since.

Overnight on Sunday, Israeli forces put new locks on metal gates that lead to the building. When Palestinian worshippers attempted to open the gates, clashes broke out, and a number of Palestinians were arrested by Israeli police.

Tuesday night saw renewed confrontations and arrests, while an Israeli court on Wednesday banned a dozen or so Palestinians from entering the compound. Both the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Hamas have condemned the developments, and warned of the “volatility” of the situation.

New facts on the ground

Events in the compound cannot be viewed in isolation from the bigger picture in Jerusalem, and in particular, what Israeli NGO Ir Amim has called an “accelerated, intensifying chain of new facts on the ground”, including “a mounting number of state-sponsored settlement campaigns inside Palestinian neighbourhoods”.

One expression of such campaigns is the eviction of Palestinian families from their homes so that settlers can take possession of the properties. Last Sunday, the Abu Assab family was expelled from their home in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, a fate facing hundreds more Palestinian families in occupied East Jerusalem.

What is taking place in Jerusalem is “an organised and systematic campaign of settlers, with the assistance of government agencies, to expel entire communities in East Jerusalem and to establish settlements in their stead”, in the words of an Israeli settlements’ monitor.

“It is very clear what they want: a Jewish majority here and in East Jerusalem,” Silwan-based activist Jawad Siyam told the Independent recently. His community is blighted by the presence of the settler-run “City of David” compound, which is set to receive a further boost from Israeli occupation authorities in the form of a planned cable-car station.

Jerusalem has largely been out of the headlines for awhile, with most attention – understandably – being paid to the Great March of Return protests in the Gaza Strip and the bogged-down efforts to secure relief from the blockade. Israeli elections are also on the horizon, and speculation continues over what precisely the Trump administration has got in store by way of a “peace plan”.

In the background, however, accelerated Israeli colonial policies in occupied East Jerusalem could be leading to a new boiling point.

Grassroots activism

The Waqf has stated that it seeks the opening of the Bab al-Rahma site, a demand that has the potential to become a focus for the kinds of mass protests witnessed in the summer of 2017. Then, metal detectors introduced by Israeli occupation authorities outside al-Aqsa Mosque compound sparked spontaneous demonstrations, with the devices ultimately removed.

Whether or not the Waqf chooses such a path, it could also find its hand forced by the pressure of grassroots activism; there is considerable concern among Palestinians that the Israeli government – along with the so-called “Temple movement” activists – are ultimately working towards a spatial division of, and establishment of formalised Jewish prayers within, al-Aqsa Mosque compound.

Meanwhile, the United States is proceeding with the closure of its consulate in East Jerusalem, and relocation of Palestinian “affairs” to an office within the new embassy – a potent symbol, were one needed, that the Trump administration’s vision will be a stark departure from even the pretence of a “two-state solution”, and a rubber-stamp for Israel’s de-facto, single state.

This week’s events – however they develop – are a reminder, however, that while Israel and the US see Jerusalem as fair game for an accelerated process of colonisation and deepening imposition of Israeli sovereignty, the city’s Palestinian residents are experienced spoilers of Israeli designs, and may well soon reprise such a role.

]]>000_1dk745benabyadIsraeli ‘centrism’ and what it means for Palestinianshttps://benwhite.org.uk/2019/02/17/israeli-centrism-and-what-it-means-for-palestinians/
Sun, 17 Feb 2019 18:36:55 +0000http://benwhite.org.uk/?p=14362With less than two months until Israel holds an election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s ruling Likud party is maintaining a strong lead in the opinion polls.

His main rival – and currently the only plausible threat to another Likud-dominated government – is former Israeli military chief Benny Gantz and his newly-formed party Hosen L’Yisrael (Israel Resilience).

In his bid to be prime minister, Gantz – whose party is currently predicted to pick up around 19-24 seats in the 120-seat parliament – is branding himself as a ‘centrist’, hoping to replicate (or better) the success of similar such candidates in recent elections. Frontrunner Netanyahu’s Likud party is expected to win 29-32 seats.

‘New centrists’

Edo Konrad, deputy editor of +972 Magazine, an independent blog, told Al Jazeera that the dominant form of Israeli centrism today is found in a group of “new centrists” who emerged in the wake of the 2011 social justice protests, including Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid, Kulanu leader Moshe Kahlon, “and to a certain degree Benny Gantz”.

“They are less keen on dealing with the Palestinian issue and instead want to focus on socioeconomic issues, such as the cost of living,” Konrad added.

Some observers identify a conscious effort by centrist parties and politicians “not to look ‘left’, so they de-emphasise the conflict”, said Dahlia Scheindlin, a public opinion expert who has advised five national campaigns in Israel.

Gantz is also hoping to take advantage of the “anyone but Netanyahu” sentiment among voters. Haaretz correspondent Chemi Shalev, describing Gantz’s maiden speech as a combination of “hawkish militarism…and meaningless platitudes”, pointed out that for many voters, “the one and only measure of a candidate is whether he is theoretically capable of defeating the prime minister”.

For Netanyahu’s critics, as Shalev’s Haaretzcolleague Noa Landau pointed out, Gantz’s candidacy is about “a return to statesmanship…the war on corruption, defending state institutions, particularly those dealing with rule of law, defending culture and the media; separation of church and state; and of major importance, modesty and a spirit of optimism instead of foulness and aggressiveness”.

But what could Gantz’s brand of centrism mean for Palestinians? If his first speech is anything to go by, the answer is a familiar one.

“The Jordan Valley will remain our eastern security border,” Gantz declared. “We will maintain security in the entire Land of Israel, but we will not allow the millions of Palestinians living beyond the separation fence to endanger our security and our identity as a Jewish state.”

Such a vision – one where Israel remains in effective control of the entirety of the occupied West Bank but without granting its Palestinian inhabitants Israeli citizenship – sounds not only similar to the status quo, but also like Netanyahu’s own proposal for a Palestinian “state-minus”.

Differences ‘meaningless for Palestinians’

Gantz’s approach to the Palestinians is also consistent with that of centrist rival Lapid. Mouin Rabbani, a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, told Al Jazeera that “from a Palestinian perspective”, the differences between Netanyahu and the likes of Lapid are “meaningless”.

“Lapid is a proponent of a two-state settlement, but his vision of a Palestinian state has little in common with the concept of statehood as generally understood,” Rabbani said, arguing that Lapid sees negotiations with the Palestinians as a “tactical exercise, the purpose of which is to normalise relations with the Arab states”.

Last year, Gantz told an interviewer that West Bank settlements such as the so-called Gush Etzion “bloc”, as well as Ariel, Ofra and Elkana “will remain forever“. On 11 February, Gantz visited Kfar Etzion settlement, hailing it and other colonies as “a strategic, spiritual and settlement asset”.

Gantz’s running mate, former Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon, has already broadcast a campaign video from a settlement, declaring “our right to settle every part of the Land of Israel”.

It comes as no surprise to Palestinian analysts. “If there’s one thing Israeli politicians are agreed on, it is that there will be no independent sovereign Palestinian state,” Nadia Hijab, board president of al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think-tank, told Al Jazeera.

“Moreover, the settler movement is so strong that any Israeli seeking power will support it whatever noises they may make about removing settlements,” she added.

‘Permanent control’

For human rights activists in Israel, the politics of Gantz’s “centrism” is a grim reminder of what B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad called “a clear truth”: that “there is an across-the-board consensus for Israel to retain control over its Palestinian subjects in the occupied territories”.

While Gantz’s candidacy is mainly being discussed in terms of his likelihood of replacing Netanyahu as prime minister, he may also bring Hosen L’Yisrael into a Likud-led coalition as a senior minister.

According to Scheindlin, such a scenario “is absolutely possible and even likely – Gantz has said as much with his code phrase that he won’t go into coalition with Netanyahu if [subtext: and only if] he is indicted”.

“A new party wants more than anything to enter government, to gain experience and hold ministerial portfolios,” she told Al Jazeera. “It’s exactly what Yair Lapid did in 2013 and makes sense – such a party hopes to be the next in line if Likud ever falls, especially since Gantz is consistently polling second place.”

Konrad made reference to the 2016 talks between then-Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog and Netanyahu over forming a unity government, but also noted how, for now, Netanyahu has indicated that he is not interested in a coalition with Gantz.

For Rabbani, a government led by someone like Gantz would pose a challenge for the Palestinians. “The West will respond as if he has no history and that his previously espoused positions were not serious statements of intent, and embrace him as the messiah and prince of peace,” he said.

“If the Palestinians decide to play along with this charade until it is exposed,” he continued, “much as they did with other Israeli leaders since the early 1990s, they will get nowhere and once again pull the short end of the stick.”

Indeed, vague remarks by Gantz that Israel does not seek to “rule over others” were greeted by an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with cautious optimism.

“Any attempt by the Palestinian ‘leadership’ to read positive signals on Israeli lips is yet another sign of their bankruptcy,” Hijab told Al Jazeera, “and their powerlessness to achieve their stated goal of an independent Palestinian state.”

]]>ab3676f67ce44506bca498089fc9aa62_18benabyadIn Palestine, even visiting a father’s grave can be a decades-long battlehttps://benwhite.org.uk/2019/02/07/in-palestine-even-visiting-a-fathers-grave-can-be-a-decades-long-battle/
Thu, 07 Feb 2019 18:47:18 +0000http://benwhite.org.uk/?p=14368Later this year, Israel’s Supreme Court will hear a petition filed on behalf of a 70-year-old Palestinian citizen who has one simple request: to visit her father’s grave.

The story of Salwa Salem Copty, of her family’s village and her quest to visit the grave of her father, will, unfortunately, not get the attention from journalists and diplomats that it deserves.

Yet, in addition to the human aspect, this is a microcosm of Israel’s institutionalised discrimination against those Palestinians with citizenship – and an insight into the heart of the so-called “conflict”.

Endless delays

Copty, born in July 1948, never knew her father, who was killed a few months earlier. The family lived in Ma’alul village outside Nazareth, but became internally displaced when the village was occupied and destroyed by Israeli forces. The cemetery where her father is buried is now inside a military base.

Since 2000, Copty has made repeated formal requests to Israeli authorities to be able to visit the cemetery. While none of the relevant bodies have explicitly rejected her requests, neither have they explained the rationale for the endless delays.

In 2015, Copty was allowed to briefly enter the military base, but was not allowed to access the cemetery. Disturbingly, during the visit, Copty saw“excavation work on one side of the cemetery and that excavations had apparently desecrated some graves,” with exposed skeletons visible.

With Copty’s health deteriorating, the Supreme Court petition filed by legal rights centre Adalah may represent her last chance. According to Adalah, “this is the first time a case relating to access to a cemetery located inside a military base has been brought to court”.

‘I want the world to know’

Copty told me she doesn’t know whether or not to be hopeful. “Israel has never been good with us, with all the refugees. I want the world to know what they are doing – 70 years I am waiting.”

The destruction of Ma’alul during the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by pre-state Zionist militias and Israeli armed forces, was a fate shared by hundreds of villages.

After its residents were expelled, the village was demolished, with the exception of two churches and a mosque. As described by Zochrot, “the village today is now covered by a pine forest planted by the Jewish National Fund”, in addition to the military base.

For many years, Ma’alul was a “closed military zone”. Ironically, the only time people were able to visit was on Israel’s “Independence Day”. It was only within the last 10 years that the churches were restored; previously, they were used as animal shelters.

Under Israeli legislation designed to confiscate the land of Palestinian refugees – the Absentee Property Law – even those expelled Palestinians who had remained inside the armistice lines, effectively internally displaced persons, also lost their properties. Despite receiving Israeli citizenship, they were classified as “present absentees”.

Present absentees

As Israeli scholar Hillel Cohen put it: “Israel’s policy was to sever all legal connections between these refugees and their villages and lands.”

Estimates of the number of “present absentees” vary, from at least 15 percent of Palestinian citizens of Israel to as many as one in four. Either way, there are dozens of villages whose inhabitants and rightful landowners live a short distance away, but are prevented from returning.

The scale of the land confiscation that took place, maintained to this day by discriminatory legislation, is why Israeli authorities – backed by the judiciary – have rejected efforts by Palestinian citizens to return to their communities.

In 2003, the Supreme Court rejecteda petition by former residents of Iqrit to return to their homes. During the case, the state claimed that “accepting the petition would have far-reaching and strategic implications that would harm Israel’s vital interests, because 200,000 other displaced citizens have also demanded they be allowed to return to their former villages”.

In a 2008 article on Copty’s case in Haaretz, it was reported that Defence Ministry officials “said the request [to visit her father’s grave] has not been approved yet for fear of setting a precedent”.

Expulsion and discrimination

Copty’s story is a microcosm of the Palestinian experience of expulsion and discrimination – a story made all the more damning because she is actually an Israeli citizen.

“Israel calls us ‘present absentees,’” Copty told me, “and we don’t have rights to go back home or use our properties.

“Israel tells the world it is a democracy, but it’s a big lie,” she added. “Maybe it’s democratic for Jews. But we live nearby our villages, and we are not allowed to visit or return.”

Copty’s struggle to visit her father’s grave is part of what she – like many Palestinians – refers to as “the ongoing Nakba”, a catastrophe of displacement and dispossession which Palestinians continue to suffer from, and resist, to this day.

]]>adalah-124017_websizebenabyadDemolition highway: Israel plans to force Bedouin from homeshttps://benwhite.org.uk/2019/01/27/demolition-highway-israel-plans-to-force-bedouin-from-homes/
Sun, 27 Jan 2019 14:16:26 +0000http://benwhite.org.uk/?p=14259As many as 1,000 Bedouin Palestinian families are threatened with forced displacement by the Israeli government under plans for a major new highway in the Naqab (Negev) region.

The route of the new section of Road 6 already entails the forcible relocation of some 100 Bedouin families. In December 2018, however, Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel declared he intended to takeadvantage of the situation to expel a further 900 families.

“The government is committed to demonstrating governance in the Negev,” Ariel declared, describing the construction of the road as an opportunity to “return to the state huge tracts of land” – language often used by officials in reference to displacing Bedouin communities.

Yair Maayan, head of the government’s Bedouin Development Authority, a body that plays a central role in demolitions and evictions, added, “The construction of the highway and its paving is a very significant step on the way to turning the Negev into an advanced and regulated territory.”

Such discourse has long been part of the Israeli authorities’ policy in the Negev. During the Nakba, the vast majority of the area’s Bedouin Palestinian population was either expelled outside what became the state of Israel, or corralled into an area known as the Siyag, or “fence”.

Destroying houses

Even without the scaled-up displacement threatened by Ariel, the new stretch of Road 6 will already have a devastating effect on local Bedouin Palestinians, according to human rights groups.

“There are about 350 houses which are already going to be destroyed because of this road,” Dafna Saporta, an architect with Israeli planning and human rights NGO Bimkom, told Al Jazeera. “That’s in addition to some 60 roads being blocked or ruined, separating local communities and families.”

Home demolitions and expulsions of Palestinians by Israeli occupation authorities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are often followed by international condemnation, albeit with a lack of meaningful accountability. However, the displacement of Bedouin Palestinian citizens gets much less attention.

There have been exceptions – plans to destroy the entire village of Umm al-Hiran and build a Jewish town on its lands have attracted international criticism. (Agriculture Minister Ariel approvingly cited the case of Umm al-Hiran last May when discussing Road 6.)

In 2011-13, meanwhile, efforts by the Israeli authorities to implement a mass expulsion of Bedouin Palestinians – known as the Prawer Plan – faced coordinated resistance on the ground, and also prompted concern from international human rights groups and diplomats.

While the Prawer Plan as originally conceived by the Israeli government was thwarted, on the ground, demolitions and displacement have continued apace, in piecemeal form.

‘Different tools’

In 2017, as reported by the Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality, the number of demolitions in Bedouin villages in the Negev reached a record high, with 2,220 structures destroyed. More than one-third of all demolished structures were used as dwellings.

But in addition to routine demolition raids, the story of Road 6 is an example of another trend: What activists and campaigners are describing as displacement through “development”.

“Prawer was frozen,” lawyer Myssana Morany, coordinator of Adalah’s Land and Planning Rights Unit, told Al Jazeera. “But we see it happening now through different tools.”

Morany pointed to several large-scale infrastructure plans that will displace Bedouin residents, including a rail line that will “swallow up extensive tracts of land and cause serious harm to the 1,400-strong Bedouin community of Rahma”. A new phosphate mine will also entail the forced relocation of at least 10,000 Bedouin citizens.

Meanwhile, Israeli arms giant IMI (recently purchased from the state by Elbit Systems) is relocating a massive testing facility to the Negev “in a move that puts some 1,200 Bedouin homes and other structures at risk of forced displacement” alongside a large-scale relocation of Israeli military infrastructure to the region.

“They are using terms like ‘development’ and taking decisions to move military structures as if the Naqab is empty,” Morany said, “as if the Bedouin don’t exist.”

Saporta concurred. “When they plan these large-scale developments, the Bedouin who live in these areas are invisible citizens that the state doesn’t see,” she told Al Jazeera.

Zionist vision

Some infrastructure projects are justified by Israeli authorities in explicitly ideological terms.

A year ago, the Housing and Construction Ministry launched a plan for housing units in the Negev and Galilee, described by then-minister Yoav Galant as “a significant step towards realising the Zionist vision of settlement”. At the launch, Galant said he was “shocked by the amount of illegal Bedouin construction” in the Negev, declaring: “We must not lose our hold on the south.”

In June 2018, discussing plans to create new communities in the Negev, Galant told the Knesset: “The south is under attack not only from Gaza – the illegal and hostile construction in the rural Bedouin areas in the Negev and in the area of Beersheba in recent years has spun out of control.”

“The programme to reinforce Jewish settlement in the Negev constitutes a long term and stable solution for a Jewish hold over the region,” he added.

Rafat Abu Aish, a school teacher, journalist and activist, told Al Jazeera how his home village of Laqiya, a Bedouin Palestinian community near Beersheva, is hemmed in by Israeli military infrastructure and the Jewish community of Carmit, “leaving no room for the village to grow”.

“Soon you will find that between all the Bedouin communities are Jewish communities or army bases,” Abu Aish said, adding, “separating us from each other – it’s very planned.”

For Bedouin Palestinians and their allies in civil society, resisting the Israeli authorities’ plans is a big ask.

“We’re in a bad era,” said Saporta, noting it is unlikely – though not impossible – that even a change in government will fundamentally alter how the state has related to the Bedouin population for some 70 years.

“What we can do, however, is to try and use this opportunity to push for formal recognition of those villages near Road 6,” Saporta continued – “instead of moving the population, work towards recognition”, adding recent plans such as the Beersheva District Plan allow for such a possibility.

Abu Aish, who was part of the campaign to block the Prawer Plan, said the experience “showed us you can’t do anything by relying on Israeli law”.

“The only way to fight is through popular struggle,” he continued, “by raising awareness, affirming our Palestinian identity, and bringing people back into the street.”

]]>aa3f0d556d224092a5950b78fcd2273f_18benabyadAnti-BDS bill: For Israel, the terrain is shifting unfavourablyhttps://benwhite.org.uk/2019/01/15/anti-bds-bill-for-israel-the-terrain-is-shifting-unfavourably/
Tue, 15 Jan 2019 14:16:57 +0000http://benwhite.org.uk/?p=14181A battle over efforts to suppress the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign has become headlines news in the United States, in the context of an ongoing federal government shutdown.

Last Thursday, the Senate failed for a second time to advance a bill that includes “The Combating BDS Act” legislation giving cover to states that penalise businesses and individuals who participate in boycotts against Israel and Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory.

The main obstacles

While the Democrats have refused to back any legislation before the federal shutdown is resolved, a third attempt to advance the anti-BDS legislation is expected. Democrat Senator Bob Menendez has said that the bill “will come back and it will have very strong bipartisan support”.

Despite opposition, the anti-BDS bill may, ultimately, become law. But those pro-Israel advocacy groups, such as AIPAC, pushing such initiatives have faced – and will continue to face – three significant obstacles in their efforts to make an exception of Palestine and Palestinian human rights.

First is the cultural and constitutional commitment to freedom of speech in the United States. Such is the strength of this commitment that even some passionate opponents of BDS are vocally opposed to the criminalisation of the boycott campaign.

A significant element of the opposition to the bill has come via the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), with the veteran organisation denouncing what it has called “a measure intended to suppress protected political expression”.

While the ACLU has repeatedly stated that it takes “no position on Israel boycotts, the BDS movement or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”, the organisation has maintained that “states should not be sanctioning businesses on the basis of First Amendment-protected expression and association”.

Palestinian activism

When bill sponsor, Senator Marco Rubio, defended the initiative by rejecting claims it was about free speech, this merely invited a public dressing down on his understanding of the constitution. A second obstacle for those seeking to criminalise BDS is the fact that boycott has a long tradition and history in the US as a form of popular protest and civil society mobilisation.

As the ACLU wrote: “Political boycotts, including boycotts of foreign countries, have played a pivotal role in this nation’s history – from the boycotts of British goods during the American Revolution to the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the campaign to divest from apartheid South Africa.”

Amjad Iraqi, writing in London Review of Books last July, cited an even wider tradition that includes “the Swadeshi movement’s boycott of British goods in India”, “the economic boycott of Nazi Germany” by European and American Jewish organisations in the 1930s, and the Delano Grape Strike in California in the 1960s”.

Iraqi correctly noted how “Israel insists that the Palestinian cause can’t be included in the venerable history of boycotts”. This means that Israel and pro-Israel advocacy groups have to argue that BDS is “different” – a task made harder by a third obstacle to the anti-BDS crackdown: Palestinian activism.

In targeting BDS, pro-Israel groups have to make the case that Palestinians are not worthy of the same human rights as other peoples, and in parallel, that Israel should not be held to the same standards that other countries are, including those subjected to sanctions by Congress.

Dehumanising Palestinians used to be easier – and it is still all too common – but decades of deeply rooted, civil society activism by Palestinian Americans and their allies is bearing fruit, with support for Palestinians increasingly expressed in the mainstream spaces of media, culture and politics.

Shifting terrain

As I describe in my book, Cracks in the Wall: Beyond Apartheid in Palestine/Israel, one manifestation of these changes is the polarisation between Republican and Democrat voters over Israel and the Palestinians, with liberals and progressives being increasingly alienated from Israel.

These changes are no longer restricted to the grassroots. As The New York Times reported ahead of the Congressional mid-terms, newly elected representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib have all “dared to breach what has been an almost inviolable orthodoxy in both political parties”, namely “strong support for Israel”.

“Running on platforms that emphasize opposing discrimination against marginalized groups,” the paper added, “candidates have introduced the Palestinian issue as what they call a larger commitment to social justice.”

Writing in Israeli newspaper Haaretz last week, correspondent Amir Tibon highlighted a “challenge” facing “Israeli diplomats and groups like AIPAC” in “the current political environment” – “the growing ‘progressive wing’ within the Democratic Party which is very critical of Israel, and now includes two members of the House of Representatives who openly endorse BDS”.

This is not to deny the very considerable energies being put into fighting the BDS movement at both state and federal level – not to mention the repression and censorship experienced by students and faculty at universities. And, to reiterate, this latest legislative effort may even ultimately be passed.

But the obstacles faced by those leading the legislative fight against BDS in the US are evidence that for Israel, long used to getting its own way, the terrain is shifting unfavourably.

]]>GERMANY-POLITICS-DEMONSTRATION-DIPLOMACY-ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN-CONFbenabyadAmos Oz: The enduring myth of the liberal Zionisthttps://benwhite.org.uk/2018/12/31/amos-oz-the-enduring-myth-of-the-liberal-zionist/
Mon, 31 Dec 2018 14:13:02 +0000http://benwhite.org.uk/?p=14178Long marginalised in Israel by an ascendant nationalist right, the so-called “Zionist Left” has retained significant moral and intellectual influence abroad. Author Amos Oz, who died aged 79 on 28 December, was perhaps the best-known embodiment of this political current and was widely revered internationally – as The New Yorker put it in 2004 – as “the godfather of Israeli peaceniks”.

Yet this image of the liberal artist or prophet, aided in no small part by political shifts in Israel that mean even mild critics are now denounced as “traitors,” is in stark contrast to Oz’s views on events past and present, and in particular on what Zionism has meant for the Palestinians.

Whitewashing the Nakba

The Zionist Left of which Oz was a part has expended significant energy on justifying the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. At the heart of Oz’s own contribution to these efforts was the following metaphor: “[Zionism’s] justification in terms of the Arabs who dwell in this land is the justness of the drowning man who clings to the only plank he can,” he wrote in his book In the Land of Israel.

“And the drowning man clinging to this plank is allowed, by all the rules of natural, objective, universal justice, to make room for himself on the plank, even if in doing so he must push the others aside a little. Even if the others, sitting on that plank, leave him no alternative to force.”

Except the Palestinians were not asked to “share a plank”; they were expelled en masse, their villages levelled and urban centres depopulated, and they remain excluded from their homeland simply because they are not Jewish. Moreover, who, other than a monster, would refuse a drowning man room on the driftwood? Oz’s metaphor thus does a dual work: it both disappears the Nakba and blames its victims as callous brutes who had to be “forced” to “share a plank”.

False symmetry

Oz used metaphors to promote a false symmetry and abdicate political responsibility. Palestinians and Israelis are “neighbours” in need of “good fences,” a married couple in need a “fair divorce,” a patient needing “painful” surgery. In 2005, he told Liberation: “Israel and Palestine … are like the jailer and his prisoner, handcuffed to one another. After so many years, there is almost no difference between them: the jailer is no more free than his prisoner.” This erasure of power structures, and equating of the reality of the occupied with the subjectivity of the occupier, was typical.

“The confrontation between the Jews returning to Zion and the Arab inhabitants of the country is not like a western or an epic, but more like a Greek tragedy,” he wrote (my emphasis). He repeated variations of this formulation over and over: “the clash between Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Arab … is a clash between right and right … a conflict between victims”.

To speak of a “tragedy” is to deliberately blur the lines of causation, to replace accountability with lamentable misfortune, and, presumably, to cast the Zionist movement (or even Oz himself) as the tragic hero who, though his actions indeed have deleterious consequences for others, is ennobled by his own self-awareness.

Indeed, as Saree Makdisi observed, “it is not quite true that for Oz there are two more or less equally guilty parties to this conflict. Ultimately, the real villains in the Oz version of history are the Palestinians, who ought to have recognised Zionism as a national liberation movement, [and] welcomed it with open arms”.

In one article a few years ago, Oz claimed that “Israel’s existence or destruction was never a life-and-death question” for the likes of Syria, Libya, Egypt or Iran. But then he added a telling, throwaway line: “Maybe it has been for the Palestinians – but fortunately for us, they are too small to overcome us.” Colonialism is always a “life-and-death question” for the colonised – and Oz knew this.

Shielding Israel from criticism abroad

Despite his reputation as a critic of the Israeli government’s actions, on the global stage, Oz played an important role in justifying war crimes. As one obituary put it, during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the crushing of two Palestinian intifadas, “Israel needed voices that spoke to the outside world offering a more humanitarian face than that of Ariel Sharon”. Three weeks into the Second Intifada – when some 90 Palestinians had already been killed – Oz used an op-ed in The Guardian to attack “the Palestinian people” as “suffocated and poisoned by blind hate”.

During Israel’s devastating 2014 assault on the Gaza Strip, Oz eagerly shared his government’s talking points with international media: “What would you do if your neighbour across the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap & starts shooting machine gun fire into your nursery?”

Oz also rejected even modest efforts to hold Israel to account: in 2010, he wrote a letter opposing Jewish and Palestinian students’ bid to see UC Berkeley divest from two arms companies supplying the Israeli military. Oz even smeared the divestment resolution as anti-semitic.

Familiar talking points

Ultimately, Oz believed and repeated many of the same anti-Palestinian talking points pushed by successive Israeli governments and right-wing nationalists. In a 1993 postscript to The Land of Israel, Oz denounced “the Palestinian National Movement … as one of the most extremist and uncompromising national movements of our time,” who have caused misery “to their own people”.

In the same postscript, Oz rejected Palestinian claims that Zionism was a “colonial phenomenon” with unintended irony, writing: “The early Zionists who came to the land of Israel at the turn of this century had nothing to colonise there.” In 2013, Oz declared: “The kibbutzniks didn’t want to take away anybody’s land. They settled deliberately in the empty spaces of the country, in the swarms and in the wilderness where there was no population at all.”

In a 2015 op-ed, Oz expressed his horror at the idea of a Palestinian majority in a single democratic state: “Let’s start with a matter of life and death. If there are not two states, there will be one. If there is one, it will be Arab. If Arab it is, there is no telling the fate of our children and theirs.”

Much has been made of Oz’s political “journey” from his upbringing in a family of Revisionist Zionists, but Oz’s rejection of a one-state solution recalls Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky’s words, when he said that “the name of the disease is minority” and “the name of the cure is majority”.

Settler colonialism

Oz’s political profile in the West is about more than just the life and work of one person. It is also about the lingering romanticism of the kibbutz, and the illusions about the reality of the Oslo Accords, and the US-sponsored peace process. Above all, perhaps, it is about the deeply held support for settler colonialism in Palestine and the continued potency of Zionist mythology.

An article in The New York Times on Oz’s life stated that Israel was “born out of a dream, a yearning,” and described Oz as “in many ways the quintessential new Jew that Zionism had hoped to create. As a teenager, he left Jerusalem on his own … and moved to a kibbutz, one of the socialist farming communities where Israelis lived out their truest fantasies of cultivating themselves and the land to become robust and hearty” (my emphasis).

Settler colonialism has always meant the elevation of the settler’s subjectivity and the violent erasure of the colonised. The Zionist movement’s story in Palestine was no different. Palestine was not a real place in time, with its own history, customs, people, and stories, but rather a backdrop for the fulfilment of the settlers’ vision of “restoration”.

Palestinians were not real, living, breathing people, but noble savages, barbarians and religious fanatics. As Israeli film director Udi Aloni put it: “The Israeli-Jewish left … don’t see Palestinians as subjects in the struggle, they only see themselves.”

In a withering review of Oz’s 2017 book Dear Zealots, former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg described Oz “as a fanatic supporter” of partition, who “tramples everything on the way to his expired [two-state] solution”. For Oz, “a single Arab state is inconceivable”; his “opinions of the Arabs peer out here and there – and they aren’t exactly flattering”. As Burg wrote: “There are many questions, and this little book by Amos Oz offers no solutions at all.”

]]>amos ozbenabyadIsraeli occupation: More of the same in 2019https://benwhite.org.uk/2018/12/25/israeli-occupation-more-of-the-same-in-2019/
Tue, 25 Dec 2018 14:00:23 +0000http://benwhite.org.uk/?p=14174On 13 December, shortly after two Israeli soldiers had been shot dead outside an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, Yaakov Katz, editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post tweeted the following: “They celebrate death and we celebrate life. That is the core of this conflict.”

Katz’s tweet encapsulated the dehumanisation of Palestinians, and utter denial about the reality of occupation and colonialism, that is unfortunately all too common amongst Jewish Israelis.

The occupied and occupation

“Incitement”, “brainwashing”, “religious fervour”, “extremism”, “social media”, “family problems” – variations on familiar refrains are trotted out, time and time again. Anything to avoid facing an equation familiar to every colonial power throughout history: the occupied always reject occupation.

It’s doubtful whether Katz, or any of the other apartheid apologists, ever imagine what it must be like to be a Palestinian in the West Bank, to have so much of your life controlled by a soldier’s whim and a general’s decision. Your house? Demolished. Your child? Shot dead. Your colleague? Jailed.

Israeli politicians and “security” officials tell us that Palestinian youth are fed a diet of hatred and incitement – at schools, in mosques, and online. But Palestinian children do not need to be taught to hate when settlers attack them on their way to school, or when Israeli soldiers shoot their classmates, or when military judges jail their parents. Living under occupation is its own education – and it lasts a lifetime.

It is hard to overstate the extent to which Israel’s colonial occupation degrades and brutalises Palestinians. Their homes and properties can be taken. Their bodies can be tortured. Their lives can be extinguished. And all of the above with total impunity.

In its daily activities, the “Israel Defence Forces” is, first and foremost, above all else, a colonial army.

A military regime

According to former officers, “the number of soldiers the army needs to keep in the West Bank amounts to more than half, and occasionally two thirds, of its regular forces engaged in operational duties.” And 80 percent of those forces “are involved in direct protection of the settlements”.

Of the 14 Israelis killed by Palestinians this year, seven were uniformed soldiers, and seven were settlers – all were killed in the occupied Palestinian territory. According to Israeli authorities’ own figures, out of 330 “terrorist attacks” in October (a category that includes throwing Molotov cocktails at occupation forces), not a single one was “executed within the Green Line”.

Yet rather than draw the obvious conclusions from the above data – namely, that a military regime dedicated to protecting a settler population and apartheid system will necessarily engender a dynamic of revolt and repression – Israel only knows how to double down on occupation.

Over the second week of December, for example, many Israelis have complained that the army’s “deterrence has been lost”, with demands from politicians and settlers for fresh collective punishment policies.

These include further limits on freedom of movement for Palestinians, home demolitions, sanctions on the Palestinian Authority and in addition, a boost to the colonisation of Palestinian land through settlement expansion and outpost authorisation.

The only concern for Israeli authorities weighing up such options – especially the military and bodies like the Shin Bet – is an anxiety not to upset the “equilibrium” to which so many resources are dedicated: enough repression to subdue resistance, but not enough to provoke a wider uprising.

2019: A wider revolt

Though Israeli analysts have fretted over a ‘spike’ in violence in the West Bank, the odds are currently stacked against an intifada.

As Mouin Rabbani wrote back in 2015, “observations that the Palestinians have not had it so bad since 1948 should reference not only the various indicators that would lead one to suggest another uprising is imminent, but also those factors that together conspire against renewed rebellion”.

The absence, in Rabbani’s words, of “an organisational infrastructure that can once again channel popular fury and mobilize, organize, and sustain a new Palestinian intifada”, remains.

Looking ahead to 2019, the next year promises more of the same. Israel will go to the polls in April, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not want to be outflanked to his right by Jewish Home; the settlers urging a crackdown on Palestinians may be granted their wish.

On the other hand, keen to avoid an election season dominated by a wave of Israeli casualties in the West Bank, Netanyahu will also be inclined to heed the warnings from army and intelligence officials regarding fuelling a wider revolt.

The status quo is thus likely to prevail – barring, of course, an unexpected development – which means more occupation and periodic, but limited, escalations. And all the while, the Israeli government will assure us that there is no partner for peace, the Palestinians teach their children to hate, and that to even dare breathe the word “apartheid” is nothing but an antisemitic lie.

]]>israeli policemen detain a palestinian girl in the palestinian bedouin village of al-khan al-ahmar near jericho in the occupied west bank july 4, 2018. reutersbenabyadIsrael’s alleged impersonation of Gaza aid workers raises concernhttps://benwhite.org.uk/2018/12/11/israels-alleged-impersonation-of-gaza-aid-workers-raises-concern/
Tue, 11 Dec 2018 23:16:01 +0000http://benwhite.org.uk/?p=14054Since the exposure of Israeli undercover forces by Hamas fighters in the occupied Gaza Strip on November 11, an incident that triggered the most intense round of escalation since 2014, a number of reports have emerged about the circumstances surrounding Israel’s thwarted raid.

On November 22, Hamas published photos of individuals it said were involved, images that Israel’s military censor immediately subjected to a publication ban.

Since then, a number of articles in Israeli and international media have claimed the Israeli forces impersonated humanitarian workers, used fake ID cards of real Palestinian residents, and operated inside Gaza for weeks with a cover story of distributing medical equipment and wheelchairs.

Such reports have caused consternation; as one Israeli human rights campaigner and journalist put it: “If true, the operation could put bona fide humanitarian operations and employees at risk in the coastal strip, where two-thirds of the population is reliant on humanitarian aid”.

Israel’s actions may also have constituted a violation of international humanitarian law.

“Soldiers who disguise themselves as civilians endanger civilians and thus frustrate the objective of the principle of distinction”, Yael Stein, head of research at Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem, said.

“One danger that the prohibition seeks to prevent is that civilians would be marked for attack because of the suspicion they are combatants in disguise,” she said.

“In this last case, there’s also the danger to the status of international aid workers – that the local population might suspect in the future, putting their lives in danger and their much-needed work in question.”

Stein further noted that while undercover operations can be lawful in the context of law enforcement operations, “since Israel claims there’s a situation of war in Gaza, it cannot claim that these operations are legal”.

Israeli authorities did not respond to several requests for comment.

Undercover forces

For human rights lawyer Eitay Mack, the operation in Gaza “shows the cynicism of the Israeli government, who for years have claimed that Palestinians are using humanitarian disguises for terrorist activity”, allegations even used “as an excuse for rejecting Palestinians seeking exit permits from the Gaza Strip for medical treatment”.

Israeli authorities do indeed frequently claim that Palestinian fighters “deliberately disguise themselves as civilians” – in May, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations toldthe Security Council that even Great March of Return demonstrators were “terrorists disguised as civilians”.

According to Diana Buttu, a lawyer and former adviser to Palestine Liberation Organization negotiators, “this isn’t the only thing that Israel has lied about”.

“For example, Israel has routinely used Palestinians as human shields and it has routinely covered military targets in civilian areas while wrongly alleging that Palestinians do this”, she said.

The botched mission inside Gaza threw light on the Israeli military’s broader use of undercover forces in the occupied Palestinian territory, including in the West Bank.

In October 2015, Israeli forces were captured on film infiltrating a protest, assaulting Palestinian youths and shooting a detained demonstrator in the leg. Weeks later, undercover forces – including one pretending to a pregnant woman – raided a Hebron hospital and killed an unarmed civilian.

A spokesperson for prisoners’ rights NGO, Addameer, told Al Jazeera “undercover forces are usually seen in protests, raids or arrest operations”, adding that the group sees those kinds of arrests as “more like a kidnapping operation” than an arrest.

Addameer stressed it “considers all arrests in the West Bank to be carried out illegally especially because almost none of them would have a legal arrest warrant to present during the arrest”.

While the NGO does not hold exact statistics as to how many Palestinians are arrested in this manner, it pointed to an example earlier this year of Israeli undercover forces raiding Birzeit University campus – reportedly posing as journalists – to detain the student union head.

No accountability

Such actions, however, generate little to no debate within Israel, according to Mack.

“Nobody is talking about it, what it means in terms of international law,” he said. “And in the case of Gaza, for most Israelis it’s not even that they don’t care – they simply don’t even see that there is a place called Gaza. It’s a blind spot; what happens in Gaza is left in Gaza.”

In the absence of public pressure, there is even less possibility of accountability, observers say.

“Sadly, the international community has barely spoken out, preferring instead to focus on ‘ceasefires’ and condemning ‘both sides’.”

Mack similarly believes that the silence of the international community – including “humanitarian organisations” – is part of what emboldens Israel to conduct such operations.

“It’s very, very worrying, because one of the basic principles of international humanitarian law is that the fighting groups will not use humanitarian groups as symbols to shield themselves.”

“This kind of operation always has a risk,” Mack continued, “so if the Netanyahu government felt that there would be international accountability for using a humanitarian NGO as a cover, it wouldn’t do it.”

Yet not only has there been no accountability, but there are signs that the Israeli authorities’ own efforts to censor the story are being supported by Twitter, with a number of accounts ordered to delete tweets pertaining to Israeli undercover forces’ actions in Gaza.

Stein told Al Jazeera she would be surprised if anyone would be held to account for the actions in Gaza.

“According to publications in the press, this operation was approved by high-ranking officers in the army and in the political level”, she said.

“And in any case, as B’Tselem has written in the past, the so-called law enforcement system in the army hardly results in meaningful action against any of the forces involved and is more concerned with whitewashing than with justice and truth”.

]]>ce9f80ee8714444586fcb9089cb4355a_18benabyadFor Israel, the peace process has always been about demographyhttps://benwhite.org.uk/2018/12/11/for-israel-the-peace-process-has-always-been-about-demography/
Tue, 11 Dec 2018 23:10:12 +0000http://benwhite.org.uk/?p=14050The 25th anniversary of the Oslo Accords has been marked with unsurprisingly downbeat coverage and talk of broken promises. Marginalised or neglected in much of the analysis, however, has been an honest appraisal of Israel’s own strategic considerations at the time.

First, from Israel’s point of view, Oslo was not about Palestinian statehood. According to the 1993 Declaration of Principles, the primary aim of negotiations was “to establish a Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority…for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, for a transitional period not exceeding five years, leading to a permanent settlement”.

There is no mention of Palestinian statehood, and the precise nature of the ‘permanent settlement’ is not stipulated. Israeli leaders were thus able to speak endlessly about the need for peace, but without agreeing to a Palestinian state, let alone recognising Palestinian self-determination.

With respect to then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that he did not support the establishment of a sovereign state in the occupied Palestinian territory.

Labour’s platform in the 1992 elections promised a “Jordanian-Palestinian framework that will agree to extensive cooperation with Israel, not a separate Palestinian state west of the Jordan (River).”

In December 1994, a letter authored by a senior aide to Rabin stated: “The prime minister is of the opinion that there is no room for a Palestinian state.” Rabin also reportedly once described Oslo as a gamble, and that if it failed, “we will have a carte blanche to take everything back.”

But of particular importance is an address made by Rabin to the Knesset on October 5, 1995, just a month before he was assassinated. Here, Rabin was quite detailed about what precisely his government envisaged with respect to the end goal of Oslo.

“We view the permanent solution in the framework of State of Israel which will include most of the area of the Land of Israel as it was under the rule of the British Mandate and alongside it a Palestinian entity which will be a home to most of the Palestinian residents living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank,” he declared.

“We would like this to be an entity which is less than a state and which will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority,” Rabin added.

This was not just rhetoric – as Amira Hass wrote in 2011, “it was during Rabin’s second term that the bypass roads to the settlements were built, making Psagot and the Etzion Bloc part of Jerusalem.” Indeed, it was Rabin who originally authorised settlement construction plans for the so-called ‘E1’ area of the central West Bank.

So, if the accords were not about nation-building, what were they about?

Returning to Rabin’s October 1995 Knesset speech, the Labour leader said the following: “We emphasised to the electorate, at every opportunity that we preferred a Jewish state, even if not on every part of the Land of Israel, to a binational state, which would emerge with the annexation of 2.2 million Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.”

This perspective is crucial – it contextualises Oslo and Israel’s strategic motivations in the broader history of settler colonialism in Palestine, and helps us understand not just Rabin’s thinking, but the thinking of other “surprise converts” who would come after him, like Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert.

Alongside Rabin, Shimon Peres is perhaps the Israeli political figure most associated with the Oslo Accords, and with the “peace process” more broadly.

Some fifteen years before the ceremony on the White House lawn, in 1978, then-leader of the opposition Peres told Israeli premier Menachem Begin that “Jordan is Palestine” and that he was “against…another Palestinian country, against an Arafat state.”

However, Peres also told Begin that there would ultimately be “no choice but a functional compromise” in the West Bank “because we won’t know what to do with the Arabs.” He went on: “We’ll reach 1.8 million Arabs, and I see our situation as getting very difficult and not a matter of police or prison…I see them eating the Galilee and my heart bleeds.”

“They live in houses in Afula and in Acre and they take over entire streets. The moshavim [rural collective communities] are full of Arab labourers, and Jews sitting in their houses and playing tennis and the Arabs are working in the fields. That doesn’t seem right to me,” Peres added.

Peres and Rabin thus approached the Oslo Accords, and the preceding secret talks, as a means of stifling the First Intifada, reducing the burden of occupation, but, above all, as part of the long-standing demographic battle to preserve a Jewish majority state.

In other words, while for many in the West it was assumed that the peace process was about geography, in fact for Israel it has always been about demography.

“Oslo, in my view, was a clever way for the Labour Party to create a series of Bantustans in which the Palestinians would be confined and dominated by Israel, at the same time hinting that a quasi-state for Palestinians would come into being,” wrote Edward Said in 1998 with characteristic clarity.

“To Israelis, Rabin and Peres spoke openly about separation, not as providing Palestinians with the right to self-determination but as a way of marginalising and diminishing them, leaving the land basically to the more powerful Israelis,” he continued.

Thus, while Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s decade in power has seen the consolidation of a de facto single state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, it was the Oslo Accords and Rabin’s vision of separation which lay the foundations for today’s apartheid status quo.

The prospect of an immediate vote might have receded, but election speculation is only intensifying, with a maximum of a year left in the government’s term.

A major part of the debate pertains to the Israeli opposition, and in particular, the possibility of Netanyahu finally being replaced as prime minister. Thus far, polls suggest that the current right-wing coalition has an easier path to return to government – with a few tweaks here and there – than the path facing an alternative, “centrist” coalition.

The need for a ‘Big Bang’

The Zionist Union, an alliance between the Israeli Labor party – headed by Avi Gabbay – and Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah faction, seems set to see its seats more or less halved, if things remain static. Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party, meanwhile, is polling at a respectable level, but still significantly behind Likud.

Given the lack of movement of votes between blocs, as opposed to within them, the so-called centrist camp’s hopes seem pinned on the possibility that some fresh faces – or more accurately, the return of some old faces – may shake things up. A “Big Bang,” as Haaretz’s Chemi Shalev put it.

Former prime minister Ehud Barak, long-rumoured to be contemplating a return to politics, recently met Livni and former defence minister Moshe Yaalon. Livni, meanwhile, has commissioned private polling showing that a bloc including a combination of Livni, Barak, Yaalon, Gabbay and former Israeli army chief Benny Gantz could garner 33 Knesset seats.

What is striking about these developments is the extent to which the Israeli opposition’s prospects are primarily being assessed (by friend and foe alike) on the basis of which individual or individuals will lead the centrist camp into elections. Unseating Netanyahu, in other words, is a question of personalities rather than of an alternative programme.

This is not surprising, when you consider the extent to which the main opposition parties have failed to distinguish themselves in substantial policy terms from the approach of Netanyahu’s government – especially when it comes to Palestinians.

Livni’s PR strategy

In October 2014, Livni – responding to remarks by Naftali Bennett – declared that she “too believe[s] in the historical right of the people of Israel over all of the land of Israel” (ie, historic Palestine). Where she and Bennett differ, the former foreign minister continued, was that she believes “in a Jewish and democratic state, secure, with recognised borders and being a part of the free world”.

Livni added, candidly: “My interest is not to establish a state for the Palestinians, but to give our young ones this state and this future in the land of Israel.”

A couple of months later, Livni made a similar point more directly: “The difference between me and Netanyahu and Bennett,” she said, “is that the world listens to me.”

Livni, like Netanyahu, looks at Palestinians and sees a problem to be solved, not a people with self-determination or basic rights. Livni’s main PR strategy, vis-a-vis the Jewish Israeli electorate, is to present herself as better able to secure Israel’s interests in the international arena.

Hence, for example, the opposition leader’s frustration at Netanyahu in 2016, when a crass propaganda video released by the prime minister threatened to undermine – in Livni’s words – the “achievements” previously secured regarding West Bank settlements.

“With one video that was meant for Likud or Republican ears,” Livni complained, “Netanyahu destroys the achievements I made during the Sharon era – that the [settlement] blocs would be a part of Israel, that there would be no right of return and that a separation fence be built.”

The question of settlements

Livni, in other words, is as committed to Israel’s retention of major colonies in the West Bank as Netanyahu is; the difference is that her pool of core voters does not include those committed to so-called more “isolated” settlements in the heart of the occupied Palestinian territory.

Or take Barak, a potential candidate to unify the “anyone but Netanyahu” camp. In December, Barak used an op-ed in The New York Times to urge “permanent separation from the Palestinians” in order to protect “a solid Jewish majority”.

Claiming that “it is [probably] not possible to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at this stage,” Barak’s only proposed “concession” was an implied opposition to “continued construction in those isolated [West Bank] settlements”.

However, he affirmed, East Jerusalem settlements and so-called “settlement blocs” – clusters of settlements in the West Bank – “will remain in Israel no matter what,” as “overall security responsibility in the West Bank will remain in the hands of the [Israeli army] as long as necessary” – as defined by Israel, of course.

Ahead of the last elections in March 2015, a Haaretz editorial accused Livni and then-Labor leader Isaac Herzog of “marketing themselves as people who will do a better job than Netanyahu in carrying out the foreign and defence policies of the Likud”. With election season around the corner, it does not appear that much will have changed by the time Israelis go to the polls again.

The stench of corruption

Last month, Livni used her speech as opposition leader at the opening of the Knesset’s winter session to make a condensed pitch to voters.

Referring to Netanyahu’s ongoing criminal investigations, Livni accused the government of “deliberately wrecking all of the institutions that protect democracy, showing preference for extremist rabbis, legitimising corruption and leading us to annexation and a country with a Muslim majority, a government that will rip the Declaration of Independence to pieces”.

If Netanyahu is replaced in the next election, it will be because the so-called centre camp cobbles together some big-name individuals deemed trustworthy by a sizeable chunk of the Israeli electorate, voters not enamoured with Netanyahu’s gestures towards the radical right and the stench of corruption – putting aside the prospect and impact of actual recommendations to indict.

But, as the demographics-focused “Muslim majority” rhetoric indicates, the Israeli opposition’s forthcoming election campaign will have nothing to offer Palestinians beyond a conditional offer of walled-in bantustans in the name of separation. And between this vision of “self-rule” and Netanyahu’s offer of a “state-minus,” there is not a lot of daylight.